Advances in semiconductor manufacturing technologies have led to the integration many individual circuit elements on integrated circuits. In turn, this capability has provided designers with the opportunity to create a wide range systems and system-level components that are suitable for use in consumer electronic products offering a variety of sophisticated features.
Consumer electronic products including but not limited to televisions (TV), are commonly made to operate with wireless remote controls. As is well known, such remote controls, when operated by a user, send various commands to a TV, or similar entertainment appliance, to control functions such as power-on, power-off, volume-up, volume-down, mute, channel-up, channel-down, and so on. More recently, the aforementioned advances have allowed features such as speech recognition and speech synthesis to be cost effectively integrated into consumer electronic devices such as remote controls.
When voice recognition functionality is included in a remote control, it is possible to instruct, via voice command, the remote control to send one or more signals to a correspondingly controlled entertainment appliance, such as a TV, so as to control that appliance.
What is needed are methods and apparatus for increasing the effectiveness and accuracy of voice recognition by voice-activated electronic products.